Enterprise services (ES) provide programmatic access to an immense, and already existing, pool of business data and functionality provided by large enterprise applications. Example enterprise applications include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. The reuse of ES enables rapid, agile and cost-effective development of composite applications. ES can represent highly-integrated web services that access defined business data and logic of existing business processes. As such, they differ significantly in quantity and complexity from regular Web Services (e.g. advertising application program interfaces (APIs)) due to applied governance and sustainability constraints.
Searching a repository of ES can be difficult due to the syntactical nature of service definitions and missing meaning that is required to successfully find ES. In some cases, ES are more intricate as a result of the complexity of business process and application functionality that they represent. Consequently, traditional ES discovery targets developers that have the required technical skills to understand service definitions. In contrast, business users have detailed knowledge of business processes, but no or little technical background. Given that ESs are defined at a business level based on existing business requirements, business users naturally qualify as users that would search for ESs.